The Maiden of the Tower
by ElvishKiwis Venerated Ancestor
Summary: What is a Maiden to do if she does not want to be 'rescued' and the would-be hero is a creep? A modern day Rapunzel written for the ACA Assembly of Christian Authors forum Ficathon. Warning: contains violence and the death of a main character.


Ficathon Entry: A modern day Rapunzel.

Dedicated to my dear friend Captain Fantastic: who may one day get to visit and see the Characters and setting for this story herself.

Disclaimer: Any resemblance between the Characters in this story and the members of the author's family are entirely intentional.

* * *

Once upon a time there was a tower, in which lived a beautiful maiden with long flowing hair.

Sound familiar? Good. It is supposed to. But that's where the resemblances end:

This maiden was not held captive by some evil overprotective witch (although her mother occasionally dressed up in medieval gowns with strange pointed head gear);

She did not live there alone (although often wished she did!) but shared the tower with half a dozen noisy little sisters;

The maiden was not rescued from a miserable, reclusive life by a handsome prince (although I am sure Antonio would have liked to be regarded that way)...

But I don't want to give the story away. Let's start at the beginning.

* * *

It all began with a dream…

Robert Buxton opened his eyes and peered across the bed to where his wife lay, bathed in early morning sunshine. He smiled at his youngest daughter who gurgled happily between himself and Evelyn in the large double bed.

"Evelyn, are you awake?" he asked, propping himself up on one elbow.

"No," his wife replied with her eyes shut.

Robert, ignoring the hint, enthusiastically shared his idea with her inert form.

"I just had the funniest dream."

"What did you build this time?" Evelyn opened her eyes and raised one eyebrow at him sceptically.

"You know how you have been nagging me to add on so Iris can have a room of her own?" Robbie tickled Mindy under her chin, and she chuckled delightedly.

"Well I have figured out a way to add as many bedrooms as you could ever want, without giving up the space I want for the garage and new workshop."

Evelyn was fully awake now. She rolled over, sat up against the pillows and pulled Mindy into her lap.

"I dreamt that I built a turret, with a spiral staircase going up the center. The stairs began at the end of the front passage, you know, where you intend to paint that fake stairway mural you have never gotten around to doing. That would be the best place, because there are so many internal walls that the floor above would be well supported…you would have to give up your linen cupboard of course, but we would have all the stair well space to build new ones… in fact it could be quite useful having several small ones: one for towels; one for sheets and pillow cases; one for…"

"Yes, yes, never mind that," Evelyn demanded impatiently, her eyes shining. "Tell me about the turret!"

"Okay. Well I figured we could make it four levels high, not counting the base of course, and give the girls half a floor each for their bedrooms. Gem could have the top all to herself, below that could be Hatty and Iris, and then Jarz and Keys on the level below and Mindy and Lass could share the first floor rooms with half for a play room and the other half for their beds, until they are old enough to need to separate."

"What would you make it out of? Bricks?"

"No that would be too heavy, besides it wouldn't match the house. I thought we could make it out of weather board."

"But it won't be round…" Evelyn's bottom lip protruded at the idea of an ugly square box dumped on top of her roof.

Robbie instantly read her expression. "Oh we can still make it pretty though. Remember the turret at Aramoana homestead? That was made out of weatherboard and had a very nice filigree balcony around the top."

"What Balcony?" Gem wandered into her parent's room. She scooped Mindy off her mother's knee and settled herself under the duvet to have some serious baby flirt time.

"Your Father is planning to lock you all in an ivory tower," Evelyn shuffled over to make room for her eldest daughter.

"Draw it," Evelyn commanded Robbie, reaching behind Gem with one hand to her bedside table for a pen and paper, which she passed to him, and her glasses, which she knocked onto the ground and had to feel around for on the floor –dragging the duvet off him in the process.

"Mum, hold the baby! I'll get them." It was easy for Gem to find the spectacles under the valance, and her mother filled her in on the idea while Gem tried to straighten the covers up.

Robert hadn't even noticed the cold on his legs, so intent was he on his sketch.

Evelyn had to start over several times as her other daughters wandered in, and by the time she was finished all the girls except Jarz (a late sleeper), were piled about the bed squabbling for the positions on either side of Mindy.

"So Dad, is this another one of those 'One-day-if-we-ever-get-around-to-it-but-we-probably-won't' plans or are you really going to do it?" Hatty, ever the skeptic, was the only one of her sisters not chattering excitedly about the idea of being princesses in a tower.

Robert, studiously working on his design, was oblivious to her question in the cacophony of delight around him. After repeating it several times, Hatty gave up and joined hands with 3 year old Lassy who was jumping up and down in ignorant glee at everyone else's joy.

Now there's one thing you need to know about Robert Buxton.

He was an inspired inventor.

This was not a profession but a gift:

Most people have dreams which are like watching a variety of movies where you get to be the main character, but Robert's 'movies' were all like episodes of "Bob the Builder"*. And the funny thing was that most of them were really clever workable solutions to real life needs.

That's how we got our 4-6 person, dog-powered, pram -made from old bikes, a trampoline mat and an old motor scooter chassis. It is also how our first child got the coolest play mat ever, with an appliquéd motorbike in various textured fabrics; with working headlights, horn and indicators for her to cut her teeth on.

The Rapunzel project (as it was dubbed), took just over a year to complete, with no end of trouble from building inspectors and engineers along the way. If Robert had known it was going to cost so much time and money he would been tempted to keep his mouth shut!

* * *

Finally the exciting day arrived, and not a moment too soon!

Evelyn was expecting her long hoped for twin boys, and they were due in a month. Everyone knows twins always come early, and Tamati had flatly refused to have them in his room with him. Now with the girl's dormitory vacated, there would be room to set up a nursery/ play room… but barely enough time in which to do it.

At this stage one would expect the maiden's mother to be showing her repressed, tyrannical alter ego by dragging her oldest daughter, gagged and bound, by her long flowing hair to the top of the tower where she would be manacled to the bed and be shut away for years with her harp and spinning wheel.

Unfortunately I must disappoint you again: Not only was Evelyn too heavily pregnant to manage such a feat, Gem was too good a cook to waste her skill on the spinning wheel. And besides, she had developed a very unladylike habit of violently attacking anyone who laid so much as a hand on her hair.

"Tamati, get off that computer and give me a hand with this bed," yelled Robert who had managed to get the single bed frame up the first two stairs himself but was unable to hoist it around the corner without a person pulling from above.

The turret was square with a spiral staircase up the center. Each level was divided in half with a door on each side of a small landing. There were arched stained glass windows on the walls of the stair which let in pretty light at regular intervals. He wanted to protect these windows from harm at all costs as they had been commissioned by his wife to a local artist and were shockingly expensive.

The girls had been given permission to start moving their things. Uncle Simeon and Yuzuru, one of his Japanese friends, were there to give a hand with the furniture, as they had been spending their holidays from college painting the rooms.

What noise and confusion!

"Jarz, Don't you touch my stuff!" Hatty's voice rose threateningly from somewhere up in the turret;

Keys was crying in a corner of the ex-dormitory, sobbing that her drawers were too heavy to lift on her own;

Iris, affecting the high pitched hysterical giggle she does when she is particularly excited, was tripping on an armload of dresses, still on coat hangers, while climbing the stairs.

"Get out of the way!" yelled Tamati, close behind her, pulling the top end of another single bed on an unnatural angle.

"Gem, where are you?" Robbie's voice was frustrated as, this time, he tried to maneuver a heavily laden chest of drawers around the first corner of the spiral.

"I told you to take the drawers out first," his wife reminded him helpfully from below, a squirming toddler under one arm and a jug of lemonade in her other hand.

"Sorry Dad!" Gems voice floated down, barely audible above the sounds of Simeon's pounding feet returning for the next load. "I'll only be a minute, I have just got to send this ad off before the 10 O'clock deadline." Gem had been ensconced in her attic room for a week already, despite her mother's anxieties over paint inhalation. At least there was one less room to move in that day. Her advertising job, although one she had been preparing for at least two years, was still new enough that she often misjudged the time it took to get work in, and she had been up most of the night putting the finishing touches on her latest masterpiece.

There was the sound of more raised voices as Jarz and Lassy, on the way down with empty boxes met the queue of loaded porters on the way up.

Evelyn smiled to herself as she took the ginger crunch out of the pantry and added it to the stack of plastic cups and glasses on her green painted tray.

"Morning tea on the porch everyone!" she called as she led Mindy to the front of the house. Keys was consoled by the distraction of her busy little sister and was trying to help her carry a bowl of apple halves without dropping them all over the floor.

Hours later all the children were asleep in bed except Jarz who was arranging her favorite cars on the new shelf Daddy had just put up above her desk, while her Father tested the bedside 'headlights' he had just wired into the racing car headboard of her bed.

"Well what do you think?" Robbie turned and grinned at his wife who entered the room with a hot water bottle clasped in her arms.

"It looks very impressive." Evelyn gave a tired smile. "But it is midnight already, don't you think you should leave the rest until the morning?"

* * *

Further evidence that this is not a conventional fairy tale is it's complete deficiency in disasters. The Buxton family found once again that Murphy's law was trumped by God's benevolence:

The whole shift had been accomplished without even one of the stained glass windows being broken. The handle of the glass lemonade jug was the only breakage;

There were no more serious accidents than Yuzuru's twisted ankle, which responded so well to ice that he was back on his feet less than an hour later;

And contrary to expectations, the twins endured their warm, comfortable, albeit cramped quarters for another fortnight before exchanging them for the more spacious accommodation of the newly decorated nursery.

Now we come to the soppy romantic bit of the tale. Any teenage boys who still gag at the mushy stuff are warned to stop reading at this point.

Antonio's mother was a childhood friend of Evelyn's. Like many sentimental mothers, the friends had harboured secret hopes of their offspring being one day untied in holy matrimony… Antonio was quite oppressively keen to make such speculations come true, but unfortunately for him, Gem was being quite uncooperative!

* * *

"Mum did you know that Antonio has got a job in Hastings now? Now I'll have to see him every week at church!" Gem wailed as she dumped her dirty washing into the laundry chute on the landing beside Hatty's door. Iris's door was wide open and Evelyn was stooped over changing the sheets on her bed. She got up from her knees with a groan.

"I am too old for this." She rubbed her back. "Do you want to quit your job and work for me as housekeeper?"

Gem raised one eyebrow. "For how much?"

Evelyn looked sheepish. "Umm, how about a couple of packets of chocolate biscuits each week, and I do your dinner duty on three days?"

"Sorry Mum," she smiled and shook her head "I'll be earning 35 grand a year once I get my pay rise at the end of the month. I'll be needing every cent of it! I'll have to move to the other side of the world on my fake passports (they will cost a fair bit on the black market); then I will have to pay for plastic surgery to complete my disguise… Is there any other way to escape the fellow??!!"

"Has it really got that bad?" Evelyn asked.

"He has managed to hack into my facebook account, despite the fact I have never added him as a friend, and he has been putting a whole lot of Photo-shopped pictures of the two of us together looking rather intimate. He even had the gall to announce on my status that we are engaged to be married at Christmas this year! I have been flooded with congratulations from people I don't even know! Most of my friends are mad at me for 'keeping my romance a secret', and won't believe I have not been lying about not liking him.

"And the worst thing about it is that he is deadly serious about it all! When I sent him an indignant email he only said that he thought I wouldn't mind as we had not been together to take any real photos!!! As if that justified it! And about the engagement notice he said he was planning to surprise me, but wanted to give our friends enough time to save up for really cool wedding presents!

"Arggh!!! Why won't he leave me alone! I don't even like the guy!"

Gem's distress, was real, despite the exaggerated ranting. Initially Antonio's unwelcome attentions were an amusing dilemma, to be laughed at with her friends, but for many months his determination to woo her was getting more and more ridiculous and now they were driving a wedge between those same friends.

Evelyn patted her back sympathetically. "Why don't you get your father to talk to him again?"

"Are you kidding? Last time I asked him to do that, they spent the whole afternoon under the bonnet of Antonio's car while Dad showed him how to tune it; I was stuck in my room for five hours until he left. And after all that, Dad admitted he forgot to mention the fact I want him to stay out of my life, and invited him for dinner the next weekend! I had to go and stay the night with Grace in case he hung around late after tea!"

"Well yeah, I guess that wasn't much help was it? Your Dad never could resist another opportunity to talk cars… I guess we could always try setting Tamati on him. He might scare him off!"

"Hey Mum, do you know where… Wait a minute. Who do you want me to scare off?" Tamati emerged from the stairs below.

"Antonio's bothering your sister again…"

"No one!" Gem's reply was too late to intercept her mother's and she frowned in frustration.

Tamati grinned at his sister's wary expression.

"Don't worry Gemzie boo, I'll sort him out for you!" He thumped her on her back as she tried to shove him away.

"I don't need your freak'n help you loser! I am already expert at dealing with creeps after living with you. And leave my hair alone!"

"Gem stop it!" Evelyn scolded; "You are starting to sound like slipshod! That's no way for a young lady to talk!"

"I…am…no…Lady!" her quote was punctuated with grunts as Gem tried to shove him down the stairs but Tamati had been growing stronger and taller since their last play fight. She soon found herself overcome.

"MUUUUUUMMMM! Can you sort your son out PLEEEEEESE?!!!"

"Certainly not!" Evelyn replied imperiously as she swept past them, her bundle of linen under one arm. "Since you are determined to take the White **LADY** of Rohan for your model, then I shall leave you to fight your own battles"

* * *

As you can see Antonio was no Prince Charming!

…But then, neither were Robbie or Tamati gallant Knights of the Round Table.

Antonio had his eye firmly fixed on Gem and no amount of rejection would dissuade him! Church was not the problem she had anticipated: Once she managed to convince her friends that the engagement was a figment of Antonio's perverted imagination, her youth group friends were united in their indignation. They conspired to rescue her if Antonio took so much as a step towards her, and the guys arranged a roster to 'mark' him so that he had no chance of sneaking off to ambush her.

It did not stop him coming around during the week though. By now Gem was doing most of her advertising work over the internet so she could avoid coming downstairs whenever she saw Antonio's car pulling in the driveway. However, that did not prevent him from (among other things):

disturbing the neighbors with his late night serenades (nothing original, just grossly-out-of-tune, rehashed old pop songs);

disturbing her mother's garden by ripping all the red roses off the bushes in order to make a clumsy bouquet ;

and disturbing her brother with his love declarations written all over the lawn in toilet paper lettering. Tamati was so annoyed about having to pick all the soggy toilet paper out of the lawn mower he swore that if that idiot came around again pestering his sister he would don his Nazguel Cape and teach him a lesson he would never forget as long as he lived.

Little did he know how true his words would be!

The accident took place on the last day of November.

* * *

It had been a long and arduous month:

The Avian bird flu epidemic was sweeping the world and Tamati had brought his chickens inside to protect them from contamination. The house stank of poultry manure, and no one had done their house work jobs because they all had tummy bugs.

Trying to prepare food for Tamati's Lord of the Rings birthday party had been hard in such unsanitary conditions. Thankfully it was an abseiling party so we didn't have to get the house in order as well. Several of the youth group members were fantastic climbers and one of them came as Gollum and had everyone in hysterics over his contortions. Unfortunately Antonio had turned up as Aragorn (uninvited of course) and kept wanting Gem to do the love scenes with him, despite the fact she was dressed as Sauron. It would have been quite fun apart from that. Antonio was getting on everyone's nerves.

Worst of all, we had the worst outbreak of head lice ever, and finally Evelyn decided the only way to deal with it was to shave everyone's heads. Iris, ever the hoarder, had saved all the hair and was platting it into a long rope: blonde, black and brown all flowing into eachother. The short bits were scattered all over the floor and causing the chickens to sneeze. Her Dad told her to varnish it to stop it shedding hair and she presently had it hanging out of her bedroom window to dry.

"At least, being home schoolers, we can stay at home and allow our hair to grow back a bit," Evelyn, ever the optimist, stated cheerfully. She gave up trying to get a wimple to stay on her fuzz without the aid of hairpins, and settled for a large headscarf instead.

"But Tamati, you must do something about all this mess your chooks are making! I am not blaming them for the tummy bug we all have, but I am sure it is not helping. Can't you keep them in your room?"

"I'm trying to," Tamati complained. "But people keep going in there and leaving the door open."

"Well, why don't you…"Evelyn was shocked into silence by a scream coming from the stair well, followed by Gem's angry voice:

"Get out of my room you creep! Why can't you leave me alone!"

"Antonio!" Evelyn and Tamati both said the word at the same time as they dived for the tower the latter grabbing a black bundle from the washing pile on his way past.

Evelyn was the first to burst into the attic room.

Antonio had her oldest daughter tight in his unwelcome embrace and was trying to kiss her, while she was struggling to free her arms, bite him and kick him all at the same time.

"You have bewitched me, my darling," he was muttering between kisses and dodging Gem's kicks with quick side stepping. "You must stop teasing me like this, I know you love me too. Let's not bother with a wedding I shall just elope with you now." This last suggestion was muttered into her hair as Gem tried to headbutt him away.

"We are destined for … OOWW! You #&%*! (swear word deleted to protect the innocent) You made me bleed all over my best suit!"

He loosened his hold to examine the damage his blood nose had made to his recently dry-cleaned outfit, which gave Gem the opportunity to extract one hand and shove him away with all her might. Evelyn, by now was also working to prise the young man off her daughter, scolding him angrily. But he only clung tighter like a limpet to a rock. By now the little girls, had joined in the foray, and their bashing of fists and pulling of legs only served to bring the whole struggling mass crashing down on top of themselves.

Suddenly a spine-chilling screech filled the room and Antonio's eyes with terror. All eyes stared at the door where a towering black figure carrying a mace in a huge armored and gauntleted hand was glaring out of a pale ghostly face. Gem tried unsuccessfully to stifle a giggle as Antonio's arms released her and he struggled, trembling, to his feet. The other girls all melted away with knowing grins at the apparition except Jarz, who continued to pummel the now paralyzed Antonio in the stomach, and Keys who gave a small squeal of fright and ran to hide behind her mother's gown.

"Who is this who dares to enter my lair and steal my damsels?" the figure hissed threateningly, as it advanced. The mace swung slowly and heavily on the end of it's chain -a deadly pendulum. Antonio, now a sickly white, seemed riveted to the floor, until the witch king drew his blade with a chilling scrape of steel on steel.

Suddenly Antonio lurched around like a drunken jack-in-a-box and dived for the open window. Totally ignoring Iris's plait, which he had used to gain entry to the attic room, he scrambled over the sill and tumbled with a sickening thud onto the roof 4 stories below. The family crowded around the window in time to see his inert body slide over the edge, ripping off the guttering on it's way past, to tumble onto the red standard roses in the garden beside the house.

"Hatty, call an ambulance!" yelled Evelyn as she dashed from the room and clattered down stairs, tripping over her gown in haste, followed at a slower pace by the little girls.

"Wow, that sure worked!" declared the Nazguel in a voice breaking with youthful glee.

"How could you say that Tamati?!" Iris's black eyes flashed in anger. "You've killed him!" Crying she ran from the room.

Gem raised her eyebrow at her brother and laughed nervously. "Great timing, Tama."

On the driveway below, Evelyn was trying to extract broken rose stalks from Antonio's suit. She had checked his breathing and pulse and declared him alive, but he was still mercifully unconscious. She was afraid to move him from the garden bed for fear of spinal injuries.

Just as she was wondering how to get an extra large stalk, it's thorns covered in blood, from underneath Antonio's chest, the sound of sirens alerted her that help was on the way.

* * *

The next week was a very sobering one for all who knew him. Although Antonio's injuries were not fatal, he had a very rare and extreme reaction to the pesticide Evelyn's mother had sprayed on the roses a few days earlier, and never came out of his Coma.

The Buxton family did what they could to apologise to Antonio's family, and although his Father and siblings eventually forgave them, there was no healing the rift between Evelyn and her childhood friend, who was inconsolable in her bitterness and grief.

So what is the moral to the story you ask?

If you are being stalked by a creepy suitor who won't take no for an answer, take out a protection order and let the police handle it.

It is not so harmful to your roses.


End file.
